On cats case, implementing standalone bootloader
may be the right way to go. Cobalt bootloader already
has pciide support.

I'm quite taken by the idea of having a boot option to tell a
kernel to prompt to load a ramdisk after autoconfig - a
generalised version of what atari does now with its 'md2'.
- It should be completely MI, so all ports benefit
- You gain access to all compiled in kernel drivers - eg: USB
- You can drop the distinction between INSTALL and GENERIC kernels
It only pushes out the cats kernel size issue rather than fixing
it for good, though a 4MB can fit quite a good sized gzipped
cats kernel once you exclude the ramdisk, and moving to modular
would allow you to dump audio and other drivers...
Of course, it needs someone with the time and inclination :)
--
David/absolute -- www.NetBSD.org: No hype required --